Category: Blog

August 23, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s a bit of good news (IFS, 8/16/18).  And indeed it is just a “bit.”  But good news is good news, even if there’s not a lot of it.

The rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing is declining.  It’s dropped to under 40% of all births, the first time that’s been the case since about 2004.  It rose steadily from 1960 to about 2008 and has declined until 2015, the last year for which we have full data.  The declining trend is the more remarkable because adults of childbearing age are getting married later than ever and the incidence of cohabitation is greater.  Those two things would tend to militate in favor or greater non-marital childbearing, but instead the rate is coming down.

Needless to say, this is good news that I hope will continue.  Children born to and living with single parents tend strongly to do worse than children living in intact families.  The evidence for that has been developed over decades and is overwhelming.  But at some point in the late 60s and early 70s, we as a society got the bright idea that fathers were expendable, that all children really needed was a single primary caregiver.  Unsurprisingly, that person was all but invariably Mom.

It took us some 40 years to relearn what our parents and grandparents could have told us – kids need both parents.  During that time, much science – both social and biological – has developed to the benefit of all.  We now know that humans are a bi-parental species and have been probably for hundreds of thousands of years.  That means that, in order for our offspring to be properly socialized, they need strong inputs from both their female and male parents.

And of course the social science on the children of intact families, divorced families, never-married families, adoptive families, step-families and single-parent families demonstrates that the children of married parents have the best chance of positive outcomes on a range of measures of well-being, both as kids and as grown-ups. 

It was always wrong to pretend otherwise, but alas, pretend we did.  Now perhaps we’ve learned our lesson.  So far, a few surveys of young adults find a commonly-expressed attitude among them being “We grew up without a father or mother, we didn’t like it and we aim to do better.”

So one cause of the decline in single-mother childbearing may be the experiences of those kids who are now adults.

Another, as the linked-to article points out, is the continued increase in total education received by Americans.  Somewhat weirdly, in every category of educational attainment, “High School diploma or less,” “Some College” and “Bachelor’s Degree or Greater,” there continues to be an increase in rates of non-marital childbearing.  So how can the overall rate be declining?

It’s doing so because the more education a person receives the more likely he/she is to wait until marriage to have children.  So the average rate for those with a bachelor’s degree or more is about 6% while the rate for those with only a high school diploma is over 50%.  Therefore, the more people there are in the higher-educated category, the lower the overall rate of non-marital childbearing.

And that apparently is what’s been happening.  More people are completing college, and they’re the ones least likely to have children outside of marriage.

It remains to be seen if this mini-trend will continue, but for now the news regarding single-parenthood is improving.

August 22, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

We can now add New Hampshire to the list of states whose child welfare agencies are performing abysmally (Union Leader, 8/17/18). There it’s so bad that the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families failed in all seven categories considered by the federal Department of Health and Human Services as necessary to a functional child protective agency. That’s right, every single one.

“None of the seven outcomes was found to be in substantial conformity,” according to the report, released on Friday.

Among the report’s findings:

• The quality of risk and safety assessments was concerning in both in-home and foster-care cases. The agency needs to ensure that children are seen consistently, including observing children in their home environments.

• DCYF needs to meet with all children in a family and with all of the children’s caregivers, especially fathers.

• Too many safety plans rely on informal agreements with parents on what they would do to keep children safe. Monitoring of safety plans also was found to be insufficient and was not adapted to new safety threats.

• High staff caseloads affect quality of work and the staff’s ability to meet frequently with children, parents, and foster parents, conduct risk assessments, safety planning and monitoring, complete comprehensive needs assessments and provide services.

Of course, each of the first three is a function of the fourth. Once again, a state is paying caseworkers too little, overburdening them with cases and expecting them to do an acceptable job of protecting at-risk children. How high are those caseloads?

[DCYF Director Joe] Ribsam advised lawmakers earlier this year that the state should aim for the national standard of 12 cases per social worker, but when lawmakers saw the $5 million price tag, they declined.

Current caseloads stand at about 40 per social worker, below the high-water mark of nearly 95 but still well above national standards.

Yes, current caseloads average 3.3 times industry standards, i.e. an impossible demand on caseworkers. The fact that they once averaged a mind-boggling 95 cases doesn’t obscure the fact that caseworkers can’t handle that load. Unsurprisingly, they don’t, leading to the disgraceful performance assessment by DHHS.

More amazing is the fact that the state’s known for years how bad the situation was but did little to address it.

Newly appointed director of DCYF, Joe Ribsam, predicted to the Union Leader in May that the federal review, the first since 2010, would not be favorable.

“When you compare the system in the 2010 review to 2018, you are going to see significant declines across all categories,” he said at the time.

“You can attribute some of that to the opioid challenges, but also to the state of the system around staffing, case loads and the lack of providers to help support families and keep kids safe at home in the first place.”

So what’s it doing now?

“The first and most important step we’ve taken together with the governor and the Legislature is to increase staffing at DCYF. But, there is more work to be done.”

DCYF will be submitting an improvement plan this fall to address caseloads and improve outcomes for children and families involved with the child welfare system, Meyers said.

Priorities include new services for children and families, more engagement with families, better recruitment and retention of foster and adoptive parents and more specialized training for both DCYF staff and providers.

That’s nice. I’m eager to see how they accomplish all that without money.

The Legislature in the past two years has approved $1.1 million for foster care adoption programs, rate increases and services and $1.5 million for voluntary services for families at risk, while increasing funding for social workers.

New Hampshire’s a small state, but that kind of funding will do little even there to ameliorate the problems of a dysfunctional agency. As of 2013, costs to run the DCYF ran to about $63 million per year. The addition of $2.6 million to the budget of an agency that is nowhere near to meeting the needs of kids simply won’t do the job. The state legislature knows it, the agency knows it and now the federal government knows it.

So, along with all those plus Granite State residents, we’ll wait for the other shoe to drop. That’ll come in the form of a series of horrible tragedies followed by office-holders rushing to microphones to impress voters with their deep concern for kids and their pro-active stance toward solving the problem.

Remember, you read it here first. But truly, I’m no prognosticator. I’ve just caught this act too many times in too many states to believe for an instant that the same thing in New Hampshire will go any other way.

Robert Franklin, Member of our National Board of Directors, has an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle you can read here. It highlights how surveys and polls around the nation have shown that Americans overwhelmingly support shared parenting and that laws need to be enacted to reflect the will of the people. 

August 20, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Returning to the California Supreme Court case begun yesterday, the allegations of Bianka M. are worth remembering.  She claimed that her father, Jorge L. was violent to her older sisters and had abandoned her, i.e. failed to act as a father to her despite being able to do so.  Now, those claims didn’t relate to her request for a court order establishing a parent-child relationship between her and Gladys M. who everyone seems to agree is in fact her mother despite not having been in her life for seven of its first 10 years. 

No, those claims relate to Bianka’s “SIJ” (special immigrant juvenile) petition.

Under the law as amended, a child is eligible for SIJ status if: (1) the child is a dependent of a juvenile court, in the custody of a state agency by court order, or in the custody of an individual or entity appointed by the court; (2) the child cannot reunify with one or both parents due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or a similar basis found under state law; and (3) it is not in the child’s best interest to return to his or her home country or the home country of his or her parents.

So, in order to attain status as an SIJ under federal immigration law, Bianka had to allege “abuse, neglect or abandonment” by Jorge.  Why would she want SIJ status?

Once granted, SIJ status permits a recipient to seek lawful permanent residence in the United States, which, in turn, permits the recipient to seek citizenship after five years.

In short, for Bianka, SIJ status was of incalculable value.  Wearing the label “SIJ” means she travels a wide and straight road to becoming a citizen of the United States.  So what did anyone do to investigate whether her allegations were true?  Apparently no one did anything.  Sufficient unto that inquiry were Bianka’s allegations and her mother’s concurrence.

As an initial matter, should the court to which the case is remanded order SIJ status for Bianka, the matter of abandonment would become res judicata, i.e. a judicially decided matter.  Any future attempts to overturn that finding would come to naught because of that.  As a practical matter too, that finding would void Jorge’s parental rights due to his judicially-established abandonment of her.  Indeed, that’s exactly what the two lower courts held.

Bianka, the Court of Appeal reasoned, “has placed Jorge’s paternity squarely at issue by requesting an order containing a factual finding that her father abandoned her.”

Amazingly, the Supreme Court again and again states that Bianka’s application is nothing more than a request to establish a legal relationship with her mother and her SIJ status.  It does so as if there could be no other consequences to so finding.  But the simple fact is that the matter of abandonment will be unassailable in any forum should the SIJ finding be made.

That of course returns us to the astonishingly minimal “due process” afforded Jorge by the trial court.  Essentially, two mailings of documents written in English and two telephone calls sufficed for the Supreme Court to conclude that he wants no part of the case.  He may not, but there are plenty of other possibilities, such as a financial inability to do so.

Neither I nor anyone reading this blog knows the reality of whether Jorge gives a tinker’s “damn” about Bianka.  Her claims may be the solid gold truth.  What’s more important though is the precedent this case sets.  Depend on it; in the future, enterprising attorneys will cite the case of Bianka M. vs. Superior Court as standing for the proposition that it’s legally acceptable to extinguish a father’s rights if he’s not a U.S. citizen and he’s received a couple of telephone calls informing him of a legal action underway in the U.S.  Plus of course mere allegations of abandonment, abuse and the like will be sufficient to establish SIJ status.

Finally, this gets close to a judicial rubber stamp of international child abduction.  The difference between Gladys M.’s departure for the U.S. in 2005 and her daughter’s following her seven years later, and a mother’s simultaneous removal of a child seems to be of no legal import.  Why not simply take the child to California, claim abuse and, if Dad doesn’t have the money to contest the matter, then – presto! – permanent residency leading to citizenship is all but guaranteed.

It’s interesting to remember that, just three weeks ago, the country was up in arms about immigrant children separated from their parents.  But, as the saying goes, that was then, this is now.

August 19, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In one of the most astonishing and disturbing opinions in a long time, the California Supreme Court has ruled that a father’s custodial rights to a child can be voided by a court without even minimal due process of law. Do I overstate the matter? You be the judge.

Jorge L. and Gladys M. lived together unmarried in Honduras. They had four children of whom Bianka, born in 2002, was the youngest. In 2005, Gladys moved to the California. In 2012, Bianka traveled to California to be with her mother.

In a family court action naming her mother as the respondent, Bianka asked for an order placing her in her mother’s sole custody.

In short, Bianka was asking the superior court to rule on her father’s right to custody of her and find that it was in her best interests to be exclusively in her mother’s care. Needless to say, as a legal matter, Jorge’s interests were at risk. The superior court, later affirmed by the Court of Appeals, said that it couldn’t make such a ruling without Jorge being joined as a party to the case.

The Supreme Court overruled both lower courts saying that Bianka’s father was not a necessary party to the suit, that his parental rights could be infringed without his presence or ability to be heard. That is, the most basic aspects of due process of law were to be ignored regarding Jorge and his rights decided without his consent or evidence.

Here is what the superior court afforded Jorge in terms of due process of law and that was expressly approved by the Supreme Court:

After filing her petition, Bianka requested the appointment of a guardian ad litem to represent her interests; she served both Gladys and Jorge with the application via mail. (Fam. Code, § 7635, subd. (a).) Bianka’s counsel also notified Jorge by telephone, in Spanish, and informed him of the hearing date. Bianka later submitted a request for order, asking the court to grant sole custody to Gladys and to issue findings relevant to SIJ eligibility. Bianka’s counsel served Jorge by mail with a copy of the petition, the proposed order of custody, which contained the SIJ findings, and supporting documents. Counsel again called Jorge to advise him of the upcoming hearing on the request for order. Jorge neither responded to the petition nor participated in the hearing, which took place more than a month later.

So, in Jorge L.’s case, American due process of law consisted of receiving in the mail a copy of Bianka’s petition written in English, a verbal notice of the hearing date and a second phone call of another hearing. That done, the California Supreme Court assures us that Jorge was entitled to nothing more. The fact that Jorge is likely too poor to travel to the U.S., hire a lawyer and contest the matter in court was ignored entirely. Indeed, the Supreme Court made no mention of this more-than-likely fact.

The nut of the matter to the superior court was that, as a necessary party to any action that involved the diminution of his legal rights, Jorge had a right to take part in the litigation if only through counsel. Since he was in Honduras, the court had no personal jurisdiction over him, so it couldn’t proceed. That’s obvious enough, but the Supreme Court managed to decide that basic concepts of law (e.g. in personam jurisdiction) were unnecessary.

Now, what the superior court could have done is simply appoint for Jorge an attorney ad litem. That person could have contacted Jorge, gotten his version of the facts of the case and presented them to the court via a deposition if necessary. If Jorge agreed to Bianka’s living in Gladys’ custody, then the ad litem could have so informed the court. If not, he could have contested the matter. In that way, the court would have lawfully asserted jurisdiction over Jorge and Jorge would have had an opportunity to be heard.

But that’s not what the superior court did and the Supreme Court has now ruled that a father’s rights can be legally diminished despite the fact that the court doing so has no jurisdiction over the man and the man has no ability to make his case.

So, did I overstate the matter?

More on this tomorrow.

August 17, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

This article is about as good as it gets on child support (St. Louis Public Radio, 8/15/18).  It’s a conversation with two St. Louis attorneys, Stephanie Lummus and  Michael-John Voss, both of whom do their best to defend non-custodial parents behind on their child support.  It should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the everyday realities of those parents and the child support system.

When Stephanie Lummus first entered nonprofit legal work, she didn’t expect that her efforts to represent homeless people and help them exit poverty would so often revolve around child support. But she estimates that at least three-quarters of her homeless clients are dealing with that issue – and it’s not a simple one.

Isn’t that interesting?  Some 75 percent of Lummus’ homeless clients have problems with paying child support.  That reminds me of the Office of Child Support Enforcement’s data showing 63 percent of parents in arrears on child support report earning under $10,000 per year.  How many of her clients were actually put on the street in the first place by family courts and their child support and alimony orders?

“The enforcement mechanisms in place in the state of Missouri for those folks that have resources and just don’t feel like supporting their children are usually appropriate … [but] what we’re talking about is the vulnerable and the disenfranchised,” Lummus said on Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air, “the folks that have run into difficulty or catastrophe in life and need modification, and they can’t get it.” 

Right again.  Child support enforcement assumes, as Lummus says, that every father who doesn’t pay can pay, but simply refuses to.  The laws on child support enforcement were born in an era that assumed that dads were deadbeats, so the most draconian measures were appropriate to force him to pay.  After all, he could pay, right?  If Dad didn’t pay, slap a 10% or 12% interest charge on what he owed.  If he still didn’t pay, take away his driver’s license.  And if he still didn’t pay, toss him in the slammer.  All of those might make sense for someone who has the money to support his kids but simply refuses.

But that doesn’t describe most parents who fall behind.  Overwhelmingly they don’t pay because they don’t have the money.  And of course, if they don’t have the, say, $200 per month to support the child, they also don’t have the $5,000 to pay a lawyer to get them a modification, so the arrears just go up and up indefinitely.

“…So if you can, as a low-income person or someone who is vulnerable, figure that system out, then you’re fine. But most of my clients – they can’t even begin to understand. They’re trying to figure out where their next meal is coming from.”

Failing to understand the court system or what evidence a hostile judge might consider sufficient to prove one’s inability to pay typically means the loss of a license, even steeper child support payments and possibly jail, all of which make keeping up even harder or impossible.

Meanwhile, Michael-John Voss added this:

“We’ve criminalized poverty in the United States in various forms, and one of the main ways that we’ve done that is through child support,” he said.

Indeed.  City after city is now making it a crime to sleep on the street, in a public park, etc.  Where homeless people are supposed to go given the lack of housing for them is anyone’s guess, but municipal governments want their cities to be attractive and that means getting the homeless out of sight. 

And of course Voss is correct to connect the criminalization of poverty with child support.  Child support orders are routinely set at levels the parent can’t pay, modifications are hard-to-impossible to come by and interest ratchets up the arrears.  Loss of licenses and time in jail only make matters worse.  For many non-custodial parents, falling behind and ultimately going to jail are inevitable outcomes.

He explained that after 12 months of missed payments or $5,000 owed, the noncustodial parent then faces a felony charge.

“Then they’re looking at jail time and incarceration,” Voss said, “so what you’ve done is instead of helping somebody make those payments and care for the child, you’ve removed them. You’ve – one – suspended their license, and – two – locked them up in prison because of their inability to pay.”

Naturally, making failure to pay a felony deals a crushing blow to whatever chance an already poverty-stricken parent has of finding a job.

“And what [state attorneys] usually request is that you pay the current plus some of the arrears. So if your current [payment], say, is $200 a month, and you’ve got $10,000, $12,000 in arrears, maybe more, they add another $150 on that. So you couldn’t pay the $200 to begin with – and now they want you to pay $350? It doesn’t make sense, but that’s what they require, and that’s what the state looks for when they prosecute these cases.”

One alternative is impossible for the parent and the other is a felony conviction and jail time.  This is how we think we’ll get the poor to support their kids.  Really, I’m not making this up.

And let’s not forget that, when the money is paid, often enough, the child doesn’t see a dime of it.

Voss noted that while some custodial parents work with the respective noncustodial parent to figure out a workable repayment strategy, it’s often a more complex problem.

“If the child’s ever received state benefits, some of those arrears are assigned to the state,” he said. “So no matter whether or not the custodial parent or former custodial parent wants to forgive and forget, if the state is entitled to those arrears, they’re going to come after them.”

August 16, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The State of Arkansas has finally wised up (Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 8/11/18).

Nearly 10,000 people whose driver’s licenses are suspended for failing to pay child support will get their licenses back if they reach agreement to resume payments under a new program this month.

Stated another way, the state is finally admitting that suspending drivers’ licenses for failure to pay child support was a bad idea in the first place. That of course is exactly what countless commentators have been saying for decades now. Suspending drivers’ licenses makes obtaining and keeping gainful employment vastly harder than it otherwise would be. That makes paying child support harder not easier. This is not hard to figure out, but it took the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement about a decade to finally tell states that they could opt out of that particularly nonsensical program. And it’s taken Arkansas even longer to get around to doing so. Better late than never, I suppose.

The program will allow those with suspended licenses to work with their local child support office to reach an agreement to resume their payments, the department said in its news release. If they reach an agreement, the Office of Child Support Enforcement will release any related holds on the individual’s driver’s license.

Now, that might sound like the state won’t accept just any agreement with a parent in arrears, but don’t believe it. My guess is that state officials will do just about anything short of dropping to their knees to beg to get one of those agreements. Face it, they’re under no allusions about the inefficacy of the program or about whether most of these people can actually pay what they owe.

Asked if the department has a goal regarding how much it expects to collect through the program, [state finance department spokesperson Scott] Hardin said, “Our hope is not to reach a certain amount, but to engage as many of these parents as possible, hopefully resulting in ongoing payments.”

That of course means that the state expects no significant influx of support payments. That’s only realistic. After all, we often see states such as New Jersey conducting “sweeps” of parents in arrears. That means the police arrest them and then release them if the parent comes up with any money or promises to. They routinely bag between 1% and 2% of what’s owed. In other words, the parents who haven’t paid overwhelmingly can’t pay, a fact that accords nicely with the OCSE’s own findings that parents in arrears tend strongly to be poverty stricken. According to OCSE, some 63% of parents behind on their payments report earning under $10,000 per year.

That’s one thing the state is admitting. The other is that suspending drivers’ licenses doesn’t improve matters for anyone.

“With a driver’s license suspended, the parent may have issues pursuing new employment while also likely limiting the time spent with a child due to lack of transportation,” he said. “Through ‘Back in the Driver’s Seat,’ the parent demonstrates he or she is committed to getting back on track, receiving this important tool, [a] driver’s license, in return.”

There’s not a lot about the child support system that makes sense and suspending drivers’ and occupational licenses is about as senseless as it gets. That such a policy was ever put into effect flew in the face of basic commons sense. That it took so long to be abandoned is the same.

Still, doing so is a step in the right direction, albeit a short one. But hey, as long as Arkansas and other states are giving back drivers’ licenses, why not take another step? Why not, say, start setting child support orders that parents can actually pay? That’s one the OCSE started recommending 12 years ago. Maybe I’m just feeling daffy, but if we can do one, we can do the other, right?

August 15, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It looks like the State of New Hampshire is again going to pay out large sums of money due to its failure to contact a father when his daughter was in dire jeopardy (Union Leader, 8/14/18). Almost three years ago, Katlin Paquette murdered her daughter Sadee. She pled guilty to second-degree murder for which she’s serving a 21 – 42 year sentence.

Sadee’s father, Christopher Willott has sued the state due to its Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) ignoring the danger Paquette posed to the child and its own protocols, all of which allegedly resulted in the 21-month-old’s death.

Case workers from the Division for Children, Youth and Families had visited the home on multiple occasions before the fatal incident but failed to take appropriate action, according to the lawsuit…

Despite those warnings, according to [Willott’s Attorney Rus] Rilee, “DCYF failed in its fiduciary duty when it knew of allegations concerning behavior and emotional and physical neglect and abuse by Katlin of Sadee, and further failed to properly investigate these allegations.”

As a result, the lawsuit states, “Sadee was the subject of multiple separate incidents of serious physical and emotional abuse and neglect, including but not limited to beatings that caused serious bruising and broken bones.”

Of course those are nothing but allegations in a lawsuit. But it looks very much like they have merit.

Manchester police interviewed caseworker Samantha Nolin in December 2015, at which time Nolin reported that she did two assessments of the case, one in May and one in July.

She told police she knew from coworkers that there had been previous DCYF investigations of the family, but did not review them, despite a written DCYF policy requiring reviews of prior assessments. 

She also stated that during her investigations, she did not contact anyone outside of the family or hospital staff, nor did she implement any written safety plans.

The lawsuit quotes Nick Willard, Manchester police chief at the time, who told the New Hampshire Union Leader in September 2015, “In the Willott homicide, DCYF failed to protect Sadee.”

Needless to say, it appears that, despite the obvious risk to Sadee, DCYF caseworkers failed to offer her father an opportunity to provide a safer home for her. That of course is in keeping with the findings of the Urban Institute when it investigated state CPS agencies. UI found that in fewer than half the instances in which a child was taken from an abusive or neglectful mother was any effort made to locate the father as a possible placement for the child.

In this case, it looks like that failure resulted in Sadee’s brutal death.

I say it looks like New Hampshire is going to pay not only because of the facts of the case, but because the lawyer filing it looks like he knows what he’s doing. Rilee obtained a $6 million verdict in another case in which a child’s death resulted from the negligence of DCYF. Plus,

In 2016, Rilee won a precedent-setting case before the New Hampshire Supreme Court, which allowed him to file his lawsuits against DCYF publicly, over the objection of the attorney general.

“I think these lawsuits are shining a light on the various systemic problems within DCYF,” he said. “We remain hopeful that these public lawsuits will continue to bring accountability and change in the system.”

Yes, the agency whose actions are kept almost entirely secret from the public anyway sought even greater secrecy. It asked the courts to keep revelations made in court under wraps so DCYF’s conduct could remain safely away from the inquiring eyes of the press and public. That of course is utterly disgraceful and Rilee’s right to bring as much light on them as possible. State agencies that operate in secret will never change. When children’s lives and health are at stake is when We the People need more information, not less.

Oh, DCYF seems to take very seriously its own interest in secrecy.

The lawsuit reveals that employees of DCYF were “either detained, arrested and/or criminally investigated themselves related to their failure to cooperate with the criminal investigation into Sadee’s death.”

The usual excuse offered by CPS agencies is that publicity would be too traumatic for a child who’s already been abused or neglected. I don’t buy that, but in this case the child was already dead and yet caseworkers still refused to cooperate.

More power to Rus Rilee and his campaign to (a) hold DCYF accountable for its incompetence toward Sadee Willott and (b) let the public know what its paid employees are up to. With a lot of both, maybe the State of New Hampshire will change how it treats kids who are in danger. And maybe that’ll mean contacting fathers when mothers are deemed a risk to their kids.

National Parents Organization of Virginia Chair Christian Paasch has an op-ed in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. This op-ed connects the child separation issues at the US-Mexico border with the separation of families that occurs every day in our family courts. 

Christian writes: 

A growing uproar in this discussion highlights the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth that the policy of forced separation has existed and been applied to American children for decades in our family courts. Obviously in certain circumstances, whether at the border or in families across the country, there may be instances where children should be separated from parents for their own safety, but those are in the minority of cases and are not what we are talking about here.

Read the article here.

August 13, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

August is Child Support Awareness Month, so let’s all be aware of child support, shall we? Yes, let’s. Now, to be aware of child support, one might read this article or one similar (This Week News, 8/11/18). After all, it’s Child Support Awareness Month, so there are plenty of articles on the subject. But if you do, don’t figure you know all there is on the subject. You don’t. Indeed, the linked-to piece and the others tend to avoid mentioning many salient (and often uncomfortable) facts about child support.

Maternity is established through the mother giving birth. Paternity is established several ways.

Or, stated another way, Mom gets her parental rights via her biology, but Dad, unless he’s married to Mom, must do more. He can sign an acknowledgement of paternity form at the hospital, but if he does and he’s not the dad, he may be stuck paying for a child who’s not his. Of course if we simply utilized the technology we’ve had available for the past 35 years and tested the child’s DNA at birth, we’d all know who Dad is and who he isn’t, and he wouldn’t have to jump through legal hoops to either prove or disprove his paternity. We currently subject newborns to a welter of tests, but not that one.

The amount of support a parent must pay is determined by using the “Ohio Child Support Guidelines.” Both parents must provide verification of their incomes or provide their most recent income tax returns.

To learn the many deficiencies of the Ohio guidelines, please read Don Hubin’s blog here.

As to Dad’s income, the process can get a lot more complicated than the article suggests. After all, if Dad just got laid off, injured and is unable to work, took early retirement, quit one career and begun re-training for another, etc., his actual income will be ignored by the court. He’ll be assumed to be doing nothing but trying to reduce his child support obligation. So the court will impute income to him. It’ll do that by looking at what he’s made in the past, when he hadn’t been laid off, wasn’t injured, etc., and set his support based on that. Never mind that he’s not earning that much, never mind that he’ll immediately fall behind, possibly lose his house, his driver’s license, various occupational licenses, go to prison, etc. “Verify” your income all you want, but the purpose of child support is to make you pay as much as possible and often more.

Does the article mention that, in establishing paternity, it may not matter whether Mr. X is the actual dad or not. If the state enforcement agency sends its notice of hearing to the wrong man or the wrong address and Mr. X doesn’t appear, he may be tagged with supporting a child who’s not his. Due process of law is tissue-thin in child support court.

Does the article mention that, if Dad falls behind and is threatened with jail, his “hearing” in which he’s supposed to convince a judge of his inability to pay may last only five minutes or even less? Nope. If Dad’s not well educated and is unable to understand what the system demands of him, his chances of going to jail are much higher than not. Child support courts process fathers like so much meat on a conveyor belt. It begins in court and ends in jail and the journey from the one to the other is short.

Does the article mention that there is no obligation anywhere that “child support” be used to, you know, support the child? No. Many a father has complained that he pays on time and in full, but when he visits with little Andy or Jenny, the child is underfed, dirty and badly dressed. Meanwhile it doesn’t look like Mom’s alcohol habit has much decreased. Dad begins to suspect that his money is going not to the child, but to the liquor store on the corner and he’s probably right, but the system allows him no avenue to seek justice. His job is to pay; once he’s done that, the child support system cares not a bit about what Mom does with the dough.

That’s true despite the fact that it would be simple enough to ensure that Dad’s money actually goes to support his child. We could treat child support like food stamps, i.e. limit it to items pre-determined to be either for the child, like diapers, or things like food that can be used by or for a child. Mom could then receive a debit card for an account that Dad would fund. Dad would have access to the records of expenditures made out of that account. In that way, he would know that Mom was using his money for the child and not her boyfriend, her heroin habit, her gambling addiction, etc. We could do such a thing, but we don’t.

Does the article mention the federal government’s massive funding for child support enforcement or its massive failure to fund Dad’s visitation rights? Again, no. Does it mention that, if it supported non-residential fathers even half as much as it does custodial mothers, that fathers would be far more inclined to pay than they are now? It’s pretty certain that enforcing visitation tends to beget enforcement of child support, but Washington would rather fall on its sword than assist fathers, even if it means making child support enforcement harder, less efficient and more expensive.

What about the apparent anti-father bias in awarding child support? No, the article didn’t get around to that. But for decades now, a vastly lower percentage of fathers with custody than mothers receive a child support order from a judge. The fact that mothers are generally less likely to pay than are fathers also goes unmentioned.

Yes, child support is quite the complex and interesting topic. So by all means, this August, let’s all become aware of the realities of our child support system. Just don’t rely on the usual boilerplate articles to tell you any but a very sanitized version of the truth.